Nothing special here for me other than Gingerbread and NFC. I prefer my Epic 4G although I'm saddened that they only provided Bluetooth 2.1+EDR on the Epic versus 3.0 on the rest of the galaxy phones. Its pretty insane on how different every carriers version of the Galaxy phone is.Reply

Actually, not to sound like an ass or anything, but a little research would show you that there is indeed no SD card slot on the nexus s. Brian may have been a little unclear, but he did say "Gingerbread brings official platform support for devices that lack external storage, instead allowing for internal NAND to be partitioned to emulate a virtual SD card. That appears to be what is done on the Nexus S - there’s no microSD card" So your reading comprehension comment was a little unwarranted.

That being said, it is disheartening to see android devices move in this direction. an SD slot was always one of the selling points for an android device over an iphone. Although most people aren't going to use 16gb, people that have a large music library or store movies on their SD card are going to shy away from this phone.Reply

If you're going to blow $600 on a phone, then why should you need carry around two devices?

I would expect my relatively expensive devices to meet my (reasonable) storage requirements either natively or via expansion. I'm not ticked that it's not an option here, but it does affect my decision and I'm leaning elsewhere a little more now.Reply

Of course no one is forcing me, dude....but the lack of microsd slot still sucks. Android terminal are better beacouse you can do whatever you want (change battery, expanding storage etc), opposite to the iPhone crap that allows you nothing.Now this is the first step into the wrong Apple-like direction. Reply

Am I missing something? It sounds like the Nexus S doesn't have a microSD card but is there a reason to think that future native 2.3 phones won't have them either? My impression was that the Nexus One wasn't really all that good of a phone vs. manufacturer/carrier specific models but was appreciated in that you got updates much quicker. Why are people talking about a lack of an SD card on this google phone like it's setting the stage for all the others? I mean don't we know that it's already lacking vs. others in that it's not one of the dual core chips we were expecting? Why should it be any different in respect to the lack of an SD slot?Reply

I'm curious as to why you think they released this specific hardware configuration, as opposed to waiting for dual-core right around the corner, not to mention the Bluetooth 2.1+EDR... This being the "developer" phone for the Android platform, I'm a little confused as to why they would release this seemingly incremental update versus what waiting for what is sure to be a major revolution for the platform...

Listening to their interviews, it sounds like they use these reference devices in designing the OS. So Google has probably had these around for months, and probably didn't want to wait to have next-gen SoCs before they could make serious progress on the OS. Which could also help explain why they showed off a tablet running Honeycomb at the same time they announced Gingerbread, we might see that even more quickly than the usual gap between version releases for Android.Reply

GPU accelerated UI was one of the features i really wanted with 2.3 (hell i wanted it with 2.1 on my nexus one.

this article is the only one i have seen talking about it.

Brian can you please clarify this? watching the video clips they talk about the garbage collection for apps and the GPU stuff games im really hoping there is a noticable speed increase

its really stupid in this day and age that android doesnt have it. Apple has is winmo7 has it, palm finally might get it after more than a year of promising (I had a pre and it was way to small and laggy i actually gave it away!)

if android doesnt get it soon im jumping back to a iphone or going over to a winmo7 phone when i look to get another phone in 6months time the jittery lag on the N1 kills the experience to much.Reply

At this point, it's a bit unclear. There's definitely GPU acceleration for most animations now, and the UI in general is supposed to be much smoother. I'm not clear yet on whether all of the UI is 100% GPU accelerated, for that I'm waiting to get a device in-hand.

I'm just uncertain how much of this menu smoothness is attributable to the Dalvik VM doing much faster/opportune garbage collection (which Google is claiming was responsible for a lot of that trademark Android stuttering when just scrolling through menus or webpages), and how much of that will be sped up purely from having a leaner UI with more GPU accelerated animations.

That's weird. Samsung's numbers are off. Verizon lists the specs as 4.92" (H) x 2.53" (W) x 0.39" (D). I pulled out my ruler and Verizon is right; the Fascinate is actually nearly 5" tall. Verizon also gives the weight as 4.16 oz., or 118 grams, which is a good ten grams less than Samsung's number. I'm guessing Verizon is right about the weight as well, because my Fascinate has to be more than 10 grams lighter than the iPhone 4s I've used.Reply

I bought the nexus one when it first came out , i was so excited. Then i slowly started to realize that T-mobile kills the phone. The single worst carrier on the planet. I could go on for days on this since my wife and their parents have the family plan. I went back to sprint. Love the phone, hate T-mobile and ATT.

I think that the epic is the only galaxy S phone with a front camera out of 10 or 11 galaxy s variants. Most of the galaxy phones are the same thing with a different case, but the epic (with its 4g, physical keyboard, and front camera) should really be in a class of its own. Reply

From my experience with the new android keyboard (hacked onto my N1) it is superior to Swype and HTC IME in landscape mode, but in portrait mode swype still rocks. Wonder if I can use tasker to switch keyboards depending on the phone orientation.Reply

Have you tried SlideIT?I went from swype to SlideIT after one of the beta updates broke on my N1. Never looked back. You know how sometimes swype lags? SlideIT never lags and aside from that its pretty much the same, except you don't 'double twirl' to do double letters (it auto detects it) and the auto-fill is much less intrusive (I prefer it).

any soft keyboard for me has gotta have a 'swype-like' functionality I'm so used to it now lolReply

Why don't you say that Android (stock) still doesn't support proxy configuration for Wi-Fi connections? It's still impossible to use the Wi-Fi network at university etc. Every other mobile OS (my 10-year-old Nokia included) do have proxy support.Reply

The one I cant understand is still no CDMA option? REALLY? Googles home market is the US, WHY would you limit yourself to T-Mobile. If its really a phone to end all phones, throw in CDMA/GSM and make it a world phone, simple as that. Reply

I swear, one of the biggest 'noob' mistakes that reviewers pull is leaving Flash 'On' instead of 'On-Demand' in the browser settings and then complaining that it chugs. Let me ask you something... WHY ON EARTH IS IT EVER A GOOD IDEA TO LEAVE FLASH ON. SO YOU CAN WATCH ADVERTISEMENTS. NO YOU LEAVE IT OFF AND IF YOU WANT TO WATCH FLASH-CONTENT YOU TOUCH THE AREA THAT ITS IN. I loaded up your webpage Brain with Flash as 'On-Demand' and it actually panned and scroll just fine without much noticeable lag. Reply

they're not good at every review, news are slow, everyday there's no new post or news.yet they call themselves your source for hardware analysis and news. They just DON'T do review thoroughly.

Someone pay them to review for all of their article. There must be some script ready or guideline for what they can say. So much hard this days just to find a reviewer which stick soulfully,loyally to their own opinion. If you are so scare of those manufacturer never send product for you to review, F*K them! Use your ads income to buy product to test and also ask from your friend that own computer retailer shop or any of your readers that are in this business to lend u a product for review purpose.

Just How Hard Could It Be ??????????????????

darn.. where is the battery life review?

oh, I'm here for the comment only. The comments are far more sincere and interesting. I still like the old anandtech thou.